


The Sunroom

by Oxygen



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Comfort, M/M, happy endings, househunting, little bit of junker culture ideas, loosely follows canon events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-04-25 05:26:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14371875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oxygen/pseuds/Oxygen
Summary: A sunroom permits abundant sunlight and views of the landscape while sheltering from adverse weather.And a sunroom is what they will build.





	1. The Sunroom

A sunroom permits abundant sunlight and views of the landscape while sheltering from adverse weather.

And a sunroom is what they will build.

 

-

 

“Wow, Hog. Could you see yourself living here?”

Mako squints as he looks through the oculus. The sky is a baby blue, maybe the same sky he’s used to, maybe not. Doesn’t feel like the harsh blue that carves a dividing line between the sand and the sky. Instead, it seems to be a backdrop for the light, glimmering city. But the sky is the sky, he can’t overthink it. He faces Junkrat.

“Yeah.” 

“The air is fresh, the water is cold, and you can walk five minutes for a beer and a bowl of noodles. Not much else a man could ask for, right? Besides a good friend in the middle of the wasteland, that is.”

Mm. Mako gives him a short, congenial chuckle. Junkrat’s eyes glimmer, wide and in wonder. This can’t be the first time he’s heard him chuckle, what gives?

No matter. The real estate agent peeks in from another room. 

“If you’d be so kind as to follow me into the solarium...”

“I don’t know about kind,” Junkrat snickers. “Mum always said I had a propensity for offending.”

The agent frowns, and Mako does too, for different reasons. Surely wouldn’t hurt the agent to appreciate this man’s spirit. It’s not every day someone brings their late mother up for the sake of some wit.

The solarium opens up like a expansive underground cave, or a church, with its high ceilings a stark contrast to the living room with the oculus. The glass is peppered at random with-- hexagons, they shift, they’re gone, and they’re back, shimmering as if some sort of display.

“You have a splendid view of the bay from here, as well as landmarks like--” Why would a landmark or two matter to them? “-- and plenty of access to public transport, should you two gentlemen desire it. Not that I image you’d need it.”

Junkrat sprawls across a strange cross between a couch and a swivel chair, gangly limbs spilling over the white thing and his momentum sending him spinning for a second.

“With a flat like this, I can’t imagine that, no! Unless we need to catch a bus for a mission from the Head Boss, that is.”

The agent looks like he’s going to frown again, but catches himself mid-emotion. “No, Jamison, I can assure you transportation will be provided.”

“I don’t know. I think it’d be fun. Imagine that, Roadhog! Lugging a full arsenal of _expertly_ concealed explosives and hooks and bravado through Circular Quay would be the best thing we’ve done since we got into the city.”

Mako chuckles, and Junkrat’s grin grows wider. The agent is quiet. Not like he’s going to say much, being on payroll and forced to give what he must assume to be two brutes a tour of an overpriced flat. Mako lets himself gloat over that. 

“I’ll leave you two gentlemen to enjoy the place. I’ll be back tomorrow with papers to sign, alright?” The agent exits, exhausted and without fanfare.

Junkrat snorts, mutters something about his first name being used, but for once doesn’t say much else.

That’s a lie, they’ve have plenty of their own silent understandings. But for Junkrat to not rattle his ear off over some stuffy suit? Certainly a first.

Mako heads to the kitchen without a word, and Junkrat hops off of the couch in tow. It’s nice, the place. A good espresso machine. A fridge, he’s always wanted a larger fridge, never bothered to get one. The countertops are smooth, unnaturally clean. He keeps the countertops back at his place as clean as he can, but with the dust filtering into the house and bugs crawling into every little nook and cranny they can, it’s a futile task.

He eyes an olive oil jar, too small for his hands to wield comfortably, too slick and unwieldy for Junkrat. Junkrat handles chemistry and wires with a precision rivalled by… an arguable few, but he seeks out, or builds, custom grips for everything. Certain weights too. Has a few spare pads he can stick on his metal prosthesis for ease of handling things. Maybe he can build a custom grip for the both of them, but the silent point stands.

Roadhog handles it anyway, figuring that if he can sip from a teensy tiny teacup for the humor of it all, he can learn to cook comfortably with this. His hands dwarf the glass receptacle. It feels ready to snap or drop with the wrong move, and it isn’t an empowering feeling. 

He could gloat over it like he gloats over the agent, but it’s an empty kind of pride. Outside of the walls of this flat, the fragile, light, glimmering city gloats over them.

 

-

 

They leave. Angry. Loud. Betrayed. He doesn’t need to elaborate on it, but his brain will anyway. They’re outsiders in Sydney, in the world, sometimes even in Junkertown, a fact that drills itself into their heads, cycles over and over and over and over and over and over and over again in his thoughts. At least the Wasteland gives a man like Mako, a man like Jamison, a fighting chance. 

If Australia won’t let him get an honest job and dream of setting up a retirement fund, at least the Wasteland will let him manhandle his way to riches, and then it'll kill him off in a brief shower of blood and hellfire.

“Mako,” Jamison hisses, gripping him as they wait for the cops to catch up to them in New Zealand. First time he’s called him that since he told him his name King’s Row. 

The first name, it’s a funny thing back in Junkertown. You’ll see someone naked before you know it, and you don’t invoke it until you really trust them. Wasn’t like that when Mako was a civvie back here of course, but it’s a part of him now. Hell, Mako hasn’t even called Jamison _Jamison_ yet, but it’s not for a want of trust, just nerves. The Wasteland really has ingrained some weird stuff into them.

Jamison burrows his head into Mako’s chest. It’s not tender, it’s not warm, it’s not pleasant for either of them, it’s red hot and blinding white and black and all they can do for now.

 

-

 

A whole lot happens between that moment and this moment. Lots of fire and brimstone, lots of Hogdrogen, lots of moments he relives as he goes to bed next to Jamison, not all of them unpleasant. Lots of police. Lots of alliances, lots of loopholes. Lots of everything.

But at some point a man gets tired. Their rage burned bright, and for a long time, but it didn’t consume them until their ashes were lost in a duststorm. It smoulders, smoulders, smoulders, the embers keeping their half-Junker, half-Cosmopolitan, entirely unique spirits alive.

And that’s how they find themselves in the middle of a room in some somewhere by some someplace. Perhaps this is where they will die, but not be killed off by a violently indifferent world. They’ll die in obscurity with some dignity and their garden and their tools and their coffeemaker and their refurbished refridgerator and each other, and that’s just fine by them.

They finished remodelling the sunroom. The couches are large and comfortable for them, with ragtag fabrics and pillows laid over them. The windowpanes are a little dinged up and fogged but charming in their own way, giving them a view of the tomatoes dewed up by the mist. The morning coffee’s never been more pleasant from here.

Jamie’s still swaddled in the blanket from bed. He gets cold a lot these days. 

He sits next to Mako, and the minutes pass. It’s a pleasant silence.

Jamie leans against him.

Mako rests his head on Jamie’s.

 

-

 

A sunroom permits abundant sunlight and views of the landscape while sheltering from adverse weather.

And a sunroom is what they built.


	2. Heaven is a Place Somewhere Between Brisbane and Sydney, I Guess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's gotta be mutual. That's how they operate.

And that’s how they find themselves in the middle of a room in some somewhere by some someplace. Perhaps this is where they will die, but not be killed off by a violently indifferent world.

The walls are a precise, neutral shade of white, not like the glimmering city with its reflective coat of armor. An older kind of paint. Ever so slightly rough and dry to the touch, equally straightforward and professional to everyone who walks into the circular room.

This room’s audience for the last week has been one it's never seen before, and will never see again. Mako and Jamie lie on the ground, ladders and tools and protective canvas scattered around them. They lazily eye the sign outside of the exhibit. It’s backwards, but they can read the semi-transparent holographic text-- “Please excuse our appearance as we renovate for Pantone.”

Mako chuckles. Jamie gives him a small hmm?

“Please excuse our appearance,” Mako reads. It takes Jamie a second, but then he lets out a cackle.

“Wow, the nerve! We should start charging them for this one. Claim emotional distress.”

It’s fine, the exhibit is just a whole bunch of paper and color cards and scraps from back home.

Jamie looks at the sea of colors as it ripples. They’ve left the oculus in the ceiling open, so the summer breeze rolls in. The sky is a strange, fun shade of blue. When they first came in, Mako had said Tiffany blue, Jamison had said aqua, and they had hotly debated it for all of 3 minutes. At the end, they laughed and cracked open a cold beer from the esky. They couldn’t keep up a joke like that for any longer.

The esky was ultramarine, they could agree on that much.

It stood out in stark contrast to the white walls, and the reds and browns and ochres of the cards.

“Hey, help me put this last card up, will ya?” Jamie says as he hops up.

It’s a deep, deep red from one of the bodyshops in Junkertown, no Pantone, no Behr. First color for Mako’s first bike in the Wasteland. His rides have never been a shade this dark after that, especially not since Jamie came along with his high octane sulfurs.

Jamie sees Mako flip it over. In the sea of cards, it’s just going to be another piece of paper with writing, and pictures, and people, ragtag Wasteland people with their ragtag Wasteland smiles, on it. That’s them, though.

Sometimes, the fantasy has them posing after a successful heist. Sometimes it’s on their first anniversary, with the wooden rings. Sometimes they’re older, outside in the garden, with Mako’s tomatoes and sage and assorted potted plants. Sometimes they’re at the cafe in Wellington. Sometimes they’re not there at all because he doesn’t bother filling in their faces and outfits and surroundings, just feels hues and heat he’s always associated with Mako and a happy day. Who knows what Mako sees.

But he always leaves a note. A simple, clean 50/50.

-

People start coming in now, or later, it doesn’t matter when. It’s like finishing a sentence you already know the ending to. Maybe it’s folks back from Junkertown, or suits they’d really like to stick it to, or real people from the local servers. They’ve left this one pretty open.

“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the great Pantone,” Jamie says in a well-rehearsed voice. A few more raise their hands this time. Someone in the front looks like they’ve been here before, a smartass in the back looks like they’ve looked up the name of the exhibit.

“Now raise your hands if you can tell me what happened to Pantone.”

Less hands, no hands now.

“It’s like Kodak. What happened to Kodak, anyway? I don’t even know. But you know they had a greater grip on the global market than Vishkar does now? You probably got here using one of Vishkar’s search engines.

“Neat stuff, I tell you. I could never get my head around that computer stuff, I’m a bit old fashioned.” Jamison taps his metal prosthetic, and a lighter and some pocket mints pop out. “Only a bit old fashioned, though.”

He tosses a mint at someone in the crowd, and they catch it for once.

“But back to Pantone. The name Pantone meant something, they were very good at talking about colors like meteorologists are good at talking about the weather. They made these cool color swatches like the ones you can see around us, and you could drive up to your local Bunnings or Home Depot or what have you and dream about your next home color with them. Could even get notebooks with the cards as the cover.

“Pantone’s still kicking, sort of. It depends on your outlook on life. The cards and the paint? Not so much. I don’t know why they disappeared or what they do today, but maybe everyone moving into apartments with strict modification codes had a part in that. Or, maybe--”

Jamie leans into the crowd, doing some sort of hand gesture like he’s unveiling a car, or the main point in a science fair presentation. “--the only people left on Earth doing a bit of home renovation lived in the middle of sunny, barren, Greater Australia. And I don’t know if you knew Greater Australia back then, but that was a place Pantone wouldn’t care to send their color cards to. So we had to make our own. And I still get the same good feelings looking at the ones from our local vendors, fancy brand name or not.

“Pantone weren’t the first folks to make nice, colorful memorabilia, and certainly not the last. The Greeks a few thousand years ago must have had some nice designer toga brands, but we don’t remember them for that! Just wine, temples with fire in them, and a whole lot of mythological fun that might have involved people eating their own children... All lovingly rendered in marble or on a vase.

“Same way you won’t remember us. Not our names anyway. A few hundred years down, Junkrat and Roadhog are gonna be history. But I hope we kicked up enough trouble and excitement to have earned a warm spot in a few people’s memories.”

The oculus above him, the same one that made them bicker about the color of the sky, glows red. Only he can see it, he knows that because all eyes are either trained on him or on the walls. He looks over to the chair Mako sat in halfway through the show. His eyes are closed.

“Well, it looks like I’ve got to step out! I had a few more things to say, but you’re going to have to settle with looking through the cards on the wall. Have fun!”

Slowly, his chest fills up with warmth. The room goes some impossible color, like the black and white and red you see when you close your eyes and face the summer sun.

-

50/50, that was the deal. Two parts of a whole.

“Jamie, I’m ready to go.”

Jamie burrows his face in Mako’s neck.

“Ok, big guy.”

Mako’s connection to the virtual reality servers got interrupted a lot these days. The heart monitor picks up, or your blood sugar drops too low too fast, or your breathing gets too shallow, and the machine calls some robot nurses in and boots you off.

They had their fun, but Mako wanted to go, and Jamison was ok with that. They never planned to stay here long, anyway. That’s what they always did.

Mako and Jamison got to show off their machines and gardens and memories and dreams and everything else they wanted the world to know about them other than _international hellraisers._

Mako could read his books and tend to his garden and have the waves crash against his legs when the reality was that wires and tubes kept him confined to a bed, feeding him anesthesia and keeping an eye out on him not in any attempt to prolong his life, just to make his last days pleasant.

Jamison could get up for longer stretches of time, mostly to keep the machinery working and to brew himself a cup of coffee. Decaf, to be specific. But he got cold, his extremities going purple and blue, breathing in, breathing shallow, never truly sinking into the bed, never resting, never sleeping.

That’s no way to live, of course. Jamison would often sit on the edge of the bed and brush the hair off of Mako’s forehead. Coarse silver, white now. Soft, soft skin, soft stubble, soft scars. What beach did he walk? What books did he hold? Which bar in Junkertown did he visit? Jamison would hop in, and they’d stir up trouble on some digital highway.

But it had to be mutual. Mako had to feel the wind whipping through his hair as Jamison leaned out of the sidecar, Jamison had to feel the polyester beads and flimsy fur from the carnival bear on his chest as Mako took aim at the basketball hoops. They had to agree that the scorpion tasted more like fried chicken and that the dust never got between the creases of their elbows.

50/50.

120/80.

90/60.

Mako and Jamie wave the exhibit goodbye. The reds, yellows, and ochres ripple in the wind, ripple into dust and old cars and blue sky and lilac lily pads and the color of the air.

0.


End file.
